Hamid Sulaiman, ​Freedom Hospital

The Author

. The year 2011 was not a comforting one for the lives of those living in Syria trying to avoid war. However, for those wanting revolution there was optimism. After 40 long years of the Assad regime there was a legitimate hope that freedom could be granted to Syria; the Arab Spring was upon them. One man in particular was named Hamid Sulaiman, a pacifist that took to the streets with the rest of his people in protest. Originally studying arcitechture, he began to work on graphic novels and exhibits in his home town of Damascus until the spring of 2011 when the revolt broke out. He jumped right into the fold creating and publishing anti-torture graphics and organized media coverage of the demonstrations. He was in jail briefly, and after his unexpected release, they gave him two options, to stay and pledge allegiance to Assad, or leave. He vacated his home and made for Egypt and submitted an application for a German visa, where he planned to stay only a few weeks until the revolution had taken down Assad. When it looked as though the fight was going to be much longer than he had anticipated, he moved to France where he studied comic art and has spent the last 4 years working on his 280 sheet graphic novel Freedom Hospital...

The Work

What is Freedom Hospital ?

Freedom Hospital is a graphic novel about a plethora of characters and a very complex situation. For Sulaiman's first entry into the graphic novel world, he did not make things easy on himself. The characters are fluid and change their minds over the course of the story. Yasmine for instance, (the character that Sulaiman stated is most similar to the people) is an optimist and believes the war will be over in a matter of weeks. A year later, she seems to understand that the war will not end anytime soon and she will do what she can to help the people as she always has.

What makes it different?

Sulaiman states in multiple interviews he takes a lot of his inspiration for his drawings and pannels from his real life experience. Below is an example of this kind of the eerie similarities of a scene from Freedom Hospital and a Syrian Riot during the revolution in 2011.

Throughout the novel, he takes care to point out where the weaponry comes from. Sulaiman says he is aware that war is a business and wants to point out where the countries that are interfering are making their profits. In the pannel bellow, in the top right corner above the sniper typically would be a designation of the name of the weapon and it's country of origin.(The image below is taken from a gallery in Germany where Sulaiman talked about some of the pannels of his work and the book as a whole. For the purposes of the gallery they took out those subtle messages)

Sulaiman's novel, in actuality, covers a span of about five years from the start of the Syrian revolt until the end of 2015. His novel uses events from those five years and makes them take place over five seasons; Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter and then Spring again. This seems like a way to metaphorically discuss the ways of how the Syrian Revolution has played out.

In the end, all he wanted was to discuss the issues of the revolt and what is happening in Syria, the horrendous regime, and the lack of true change. Through all of this, he doesn't give up hope.

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